What do user researchers do?

In this video, user researchers discuss their current roles, their day-to-day work, and their previous experience.

User researchers help teams to understand their users and deliver the outcome those users need.

The following tasks are regularly conducted by user researchers:

• conducting collaborative sessions with the team to define research objectives and questions
• planning research to answer the team’s questions
• creating research materials, which can include discussion guides, workshop activities, note-taking guides and template sheets
• participant recruitment and scheduling of research sessions
• conducting research sessions with users
• holding full team observation and analysis sessions
• synthesising and analysing the data collected
• creating and presenting research findings at team playback sessions
• participating in team ideation and design activities

As a user researcher, you will help your team work out what they need to know about their users and then design research studies to get the answers they need to make decisions.

Depending on what stage the development of the product or service has reached, the exact process you will use will vary.

In simple terms, in the early stages of development, known as discovery and alpha, you are gathering information on who your users are and what they need. In the later stages, beta and live, you are gathering information on how they are interacting with an actual product or service to find out how that service can be improved. We will look at these development phases in more detail in Week 2.

What else do user researchers do?

User researchers are usually very comfortable in uncertain spaces, such as doing discovery research. Sometimes things go wrong, but that’s when we can learn the most. However, not all team members will feel like this!

Being a user researcher means taking time to understand the context and constraints of your team and working out what combination of research methods can be used to get actionable insights.

This almost always means finding the right balance between how much research you do and how much time you and your team have. It is your research that provides the insights the team needs to build solutions that will work for users, so you need to work out how to do quality research while supporting your team to deliver at pace.

For example, this might mean working with performance analysts to find alternative approaches to learning about your users, such as developing hypotheses and performance frameworks. Alternatively, if what the team has planned is very low risk, it may mean doing no research at all and monitoring the impact of a change through feedback and analytics.

Sometimes you may do research that reveals that the solution the team is developing is unnecessary or simply will not work. These situations can be very frustrating and it can be quite intimidating to have to break bad news to your colleagues and to stakeholders, but it is important that you trust your research and ensure your team listens to users.

If these situations occur, you need to work with your users, your product manager and design team, and your other stakeholders to choose a different approach – one that everyone agrees will work.